February 27th, 2008
I got an unexpected email from a colleague this morning, which said, simply, “It has been a few weeks since any new posts have appeared on your blog. I trust all is well with you.” He and I don’t communicate that often; indeed, it appears that I’ve gotten only five emails from him since the [...]
February 10th, 2008
It was a big deal in the United States when we lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Among the many arguments in favor of such a change was that 18 year old citizens could join the army, fight for their country, get a driver’s license, get married, and generally perform all sorts of [...]
February 9th, 2008
A recent Joel Spolsky blog posting alerted me to the intriguing features of TripIt.com, a travel-management site that I had heard of, but never used before. By coincidence, I had just finished making plane, hotel, and auto-rental reservations for a trip in March, so I had just received the basic documents that TripIt requires to [...]
February 8th, 2008
My old-fashioned, dead-tree version of the February 2008 issue IEEE Computer arrived this afternoon and I glanced at the cover to see what it was all about. The theme of the issue is “The Pervasive Web,” and I noticed that one of the highlighted articles was “Social Networking“, by Alfred C. Weaver and Benjamin B. [...]
February 4th, 2008
Once upon a time, taxi drivers had to demonstrate that they could find their way around a city before they were given a license. It may be folklore, but my understanding is that prospective London taxi-drivers had to memorize most of the arcane streets and points of interest within that ancient city. At the very [...]
